Mickey Moniak, Your NL Slugging Leader (For Now)

With Thursday’s 6-2 win over the Mets, the Rockies snapped a six-game losing streak and lifted their record to 15-23, momentarily escaping the distinction of owning at least a share of the National League’s worst record, which is currently shared by those Mets and the Giants (14-23). If they are again one of the majors’ worst teams, the Rox are at least not on pace to approach last year’s 119 losses, nor are they entirely devoid of bright spots, including catcher Hunter Goodman, starter Tomoyuki Sugano, and relievers Chase Dollander and Antonio Senzatela. But by far their brightest spot lately has been the play of Mickey Moniak. Now in his second season with the team, Moniak leads the league in slugging percentage (.700), ranks second in wRC+ (176), and is third in home runs (11) despite barely having enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title.

Alas, the 18-game hitting streak Moniak rode into Thursday came to an end in that victory, as he went 0-for-3 with a strikeout and a walk. He’d barely kept the streak alive on Wednesday night, going hitless in his first four plate appearances. He got under a pair of hard-hit balls against Mets starter Freddy Peralta, producing a popup to shortstop and a fly out to center field, both routine, and struck out twice, once against a high Peralta fastball and once against a low-and-away Brooks Raley sweeper. By the time he came to the plate for the fifth time, the Rockies were down 10-4 with one out in the ninth. Moniak ripped a hot smash 106.7 mph just to the left of pitcher Sean Manaea and past the outstretched glove of second baseman Marcus Semien as he dove to his right.

During Thursday’s game, Moniak’s contact wasn’t nearly as solid, though he almost kept the streak alive with a soft liner. The ball’s 64.3-mph exit velocity and 21-degree launch angle made it the kind of flare that actually lands for a hit more often than not, with just enough oomph to get over the infield dirt; the expected batting average on such balls is .550, but Semien did a fine job chasing that one down.

It just wasn’t Moniak’s day, so had to settle merely for matching his previous personal best, an 18-game hitting streak that he ran off from July 2–July 28, 2023 while playing for the Angels. It was still the Rockies’ longest streak since 2022, when Brendan Rodgers hit safely in 20 straight games from May 9 to June 2.

During the streak, the nearly 28-year-old Moniak — his birthday is May 13 — not only lifted his slash line to .318/.367/.700, he also finally reached the plate appearances threshold to officially qualify for the league lead in rate stats. He had to play catch-up because he missed Colorado’s first six games due to a sprained right ring finger, suffered while diving back to first base during a spring training game. He entered Wednesday leading the NL in slugging percentage with the help of a single phantom at-bat, but now he’s the official leader, and is also ninth in batting average.

It’s been an impressive and unexpectedly strong start for Moniak, the former no. 1 overall pick (2016, by the Phillies) on whom the industry collectively whiffed, as none of his tools turned out to be above average. Free-swinging and pull-happy, he’s landed in a place that particularly rewards his tendency to hit the ball in the air, even if it’s part of a package that limits him to a platoon role and forces his team to grin and bear his defense.

More on all of that shortly, but if Moniak hasn’t entirely panned out, he’s hardly alone among the no. 1 picks of this millennium:

Limiting the comparison to position players chosen first in this millennium prior to Moniak, only Young and Beckham fared worse. Both are now retired, and at the other end of the spectrum, the jury is obviously still out on Bazzana, who made his major league debut on April 28. That said, Moniak has turned the corner in ways that have eluded some more recent picks, and he does have the highest 2026 WAR from among the nine active players above (1.4).

At the time the Phillies chose Moniak out of La Costa Canyon High School in Carlsbad, California, he was viewed quite favorably. Baseball America had ranked him as the fifth-best prospect entering the draft, writing in part, “He’s a hitter with feel for the barrel that evokes comparisons to Christian Yelich, a fellow SoCal prep outfield product, and solid power to the gaps.” MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis called Moniak a player with “one of the highest floors in the Draft,” and added, “He’s a surefire up-the-middle-player in a Draft that doesn’t have many of them. Moniak is going to hit. He’s going to run. He’s going to play a good center field.”

I went into much greater detail with Moniak’s back story when he was in the middle of that 2023 hitting streak, but long story short, things never clicked for him with the Phillies. He netted -0.8 WAR in 47 games for them while hitting an unfathomable .129/.214/.172 (7 wRC+) in 105 plate appearances from 2020–22. On August 2, 2022, he was traded to the Angels, along with Jadiel Sanchez, for Noah Syndergaard, who was just about to embark upon the final productive stretch of his career. Moniak didn’t do much in 19 post-trade major league games that season, but after spending the first six weeks of 2023 at Triple-A Salt Lake City, he was called up and went on a tear for about two and a half months, hitting .313/.346/.567 (147 wRC+) from mid-May through the end of July. Inevitably, he tailed off, producing just a 53 wRC+ the rest of the way and finishing at .280/.307/.495 (115 wRC+) and 1.8 WAR in 85 games.

What was particularly remarkable was that Moniak got to that respectable-looking batting line with a ridiculous .397 BABIP (third among players with at least 300 plate appearances), a 35.0% strikeout rate (seventh), and just a 2.8% walk rate (second lowest). Among that 300-PA group, his 46.3% chase rate and 21.9% swinging strike rate were both the highest. Those extremes made sustaining that level of production unlikely, and even while being shunted into a platoon role that protected him from lefties, Moniak crashed back to Earth in 2024, hitting .219/.266/.380. While he cut his chase rate and his swinging strike rates, with his walk and strikeout rates improving (to 5.0% and 27.3%, respectively), he didn’t hit the ball quite as hard, and he struggled against four-seam fastballs.

After a rough spring training, the Angels — a team not exactly overloaded with talent — released Moniak in late March 2025. The Rockies snapped him up a couple of days later and continued to platoon him; he started 103 games against righties and 10 against lefties, spending time at all three outfield spots with a high of 58 starts (and 72 total appearances) in right field, and DH’d as well. On an utterly dreadful team that lost more games than all but the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, 2024 White Sox, and 1962 Mets, Moniak hit a respectable .270/.306/.518 (110 wRC+) and again cut his chase and swinging strike rates while placing second on the team in home runs (24), RBI (68), and WAR (0.6). That last figure, of course, doesn’t cut it; Moniak was DH-caliber in the outfield, with combined totals of -23 DRS (the worst among all outfielders by five full runs) and -12 FRV (merely tied with Nick Castellanos for third worst).

The Rockies have used Moniak similarly this season, with 26 of his 27 starts coming against righties. He’s started 13 times in left field, eight in right, four at DH, and two in center, and he’s already in the red defensively (-3 DRS, -1 FRV), though his Statcast range and arm ratings have been much closer to average.

Defense aside, Moniak has not only continued to take to Coors Field in a major way, he’s fared much better on the road than he did last year, albeit in a very small sample:

More fundamentally than that, Moniak has made some adjustments to his swing and is hitting the ball harder, in the air more, and to his pull side more often. Sound familiar? Based on Statcast data that goes back to the second half of 2023, Moniak has gradually closed off his stance. He’s gained a bit of bat speed since coming to Colorado, and his intercept point has gotten farther out front:

Making contact farther out front means a greater chance of putting the ball in the air, and of hitting it to the pull side, and you can see Moniak has incrementally improved in those areas while playing in an environment where the payoff for those improvements is as high as it gets. At the major league level, Moniak has always been quite pull-happy, but he’s gone from splitting those balls to the pull side pretty evenly between the ground and the air to nearly doubling his ratio in favor of the latter:

How much of a difference does that make? First take a look at the splits on those pull-side balls:

The expected slugging percentage on those pulled balls once they’re off the ground is usually 700 or 800 points higher, but thanks to the increased launch angle, that gap is about 1100 points right now — and even then, Moniak is outdoing those expectations by a country mile. So although his overall exit velocity, barrel and hard-hit rates, and expected stats are in line with what they were last year…

… the extra six degrees in launch angle, with that pull frequency, have helped him outdo his expected stats to such an extreme degree that his gaps are each the majors’ largest in their respective categories.

Is all of that sustainable? Probably not, at least not to that degree. Moniak’s 6.7% walk rate and 25.0% strikeout rate aren’t as extreme as his previous marks, but he’s still chasing 41.4% of pitches outside the zone and whiffing on 29.3% of his swings. I expect to see pitchers take advantage of his free-swinging approach by throwing him fewer strikes, particularly inside, where he can’t easily pull the ball fair. Still, it’s fun to see him in an environment where he’s absolutely raking, and for the Rockies, a team that doesn’t have many reasons to watch, that’s enough.